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What the heart desires…

Why am I the way I am? What makes you, well, you? Why do we believe the things we believe?

The short answer is, “No one knows, exactly.” The longer answer suggests there are at least some aspects we can know.

Genetics plays a large and mysterious part: some of us tend towards depression more than others due to chemical levels in the brain, for example. But our genes to some degree can be “tweaked,” so to speak, through behavioral counseling that results in a new perception of our self.

Which brings us to environment and upbringing as key factors in determining who we become. The outlook we accept concerning the nature of life seems to be almost unanimously informed by our parents or close relatives and friends at our earliest ages.

It also seems, sometimes sadly, that depending on ones’ desires or level of trauma at a young age, people have varying abilities adjusting the mindset imprinted on them. All the more reason to nurture and care for children as best we can.

What we are left with at the end of the day is a self constructed of genetics and experiences that are intimately interconnected, with genetics affecting our perception of our experiences and experiences sublty altering the structure of who we are. Our will, our heart’s desires, flow from this spring. And as a fantastic, obscure quote I came across recently states, “What the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies.”

At a base level, I want to suggest we are not entirely culpable for the desires that come from our heart – they’re a result, largely, of those genes and experiences. And yet, we are all capable of understanding basic desires within us that are “good” and “bad.” Defining what comprises “good” and “bad” is a separate topic, but there is a decent argument to be made that most human cultures tend to share the same basic morals.

We are thus capable of recognizing within ourselves desires that are healthy and unhealthy. We disagree on what constitutes “healthy” and “unhealthy” on some issues, but on more basic premises we tend to agree: anger is damaging when left unaddressed; bitterness eats away at us; real love is healing and empowering; etc.

If we are interested in being happy and healthy, as most of us give lip-service to, we will – with help – begin to confront the demons that are eating away at us from the inside. That’s incredibly hard and intimidating, but the alternative is to continue existing in our state of “just getting by,” which is sometimes all we can do, but is a really depressing end-goal for our lives.

Eventually the things we distract ourselves with will be out of reach. If we dig into the reasons why we crave these distractions, if we begin to heal from our damage, we begin to live with joy. And the reasons why we should consider doing this go beyond the selfish – if we care about the people we are intimate with, we will seek confrontation with our darkness for their sake, because when we’re honest with ourselves we know our own damage hurts those we love.

In the next post I will share some personal tales of failure and damage and how that influenced my perspective on life. I am a broken individual, but I’m choosing to turn the desires of my heart to the better and healthier things in life. I think if we really want to see life for whatever truth is to be understood out there, if any, we have to do that – otherwise our rationality, our justifications, and our perceptions will continuously be colored by our damage.

2 thoughts on “What the heart desires…”

Great post, but it sounds like just the tip of the iceberg you have on this thought.
I wrote something the may be just faintly relative to this subject on the surface, but completely relative at the heart of it all.
The post was called Soul Mate Sham? http://achanginggrace.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/soul-mate-sham/
Essentially, much of what our hearts constantly desire has a lot to do with a famous quote by fourth-century philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine.

“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,”

Keep up the great work, and I look forward to your upcoming posts about this.

Thanks, Mike 🙂 That was a good post of yours on the soul mate-deal…people don’t realize it, but that entire concept comes from Greek mythology; there’s nothing “Christiany” about it – it’s the Greek concept that the gods originally split every person into a male and female component and set us to drift through life hoping that we bump into the one who was originally a part of us.

It makes for nice romanticism, but not only does it have no foundation in reality, I agree that that entire mindset can easily lead someone who isn’t “feeling” great about whatever relationship they are currently in to conclude that they should look for someone else because, “obviously, this person isn’t right for me, anymore.” Which is just wrong on multiple levels, not the least of which being this whole idea that relationships are supposed to be easy and we’re always supposed to “feel in love” with whoever we are with.

Not a big surprise I’m still single, huh? 🙂 Thanks for being one of my three or four readers!